On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 09:03:51PM -0500, Morten Welinder wrote: > On Tue, 01 Feb 2005 15:57:55 -0700, Andreas J. Guelzow > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > In view of CEILING(-2.5) == -3 and FLOOR(-2.5) == -2 > > CEIL is the sane version of CEILING. > INT is the sane version of FLOOR. > > The mistake here is to try to make sense of this. If the rounding function > group in Excel had been designed with just one iota of sense we would > not have this mess. As it is, we have. The best we can do is to offer > our sincere apologies in the help text (after we reorganize all the help > texts).
As I explained clearly in bug 162682 this isn't a matter of Excel compatibility it's simply that Gnumeric's rounding functions were hacked in quickly and never tested. Go ahead, do as I just did and type "=CEILING(-2.5)" into Excel, and it will tell you that you need to specify an additional argument, and offer to show you Excel's help pages for the 2-argument CEILING() function. Some weeks ago I asked Andreas about this stuff, but he claimed the Excel functions were a "generalisation" of the mathematical functions ceiling() and floor(). I have no idea where he got his idea from, he doesn't seem to have a copy of Excel or of the Excel documentation, which is why I asked him if he understood it. Instead he took my question as an insult, and tried to insult me back, as though this was a game of some sort. It would seem sensible for Gnumeric to provide the ceiling() and floor() mathmetical functions as the single parameter versions of CEILING() and FLOOR() or if not, to eliminate these single parameter versions altogether and provide a good signpost to the relevant single parameter function. This all seems like a distraction from the main thrust of bug 162682 which has a perfectly good fix waiting to be checked in. And, FWIW, I recommend that you retain PI() as close as practical to the ratio between the area of a circle and the square of its radius according to Euclidean geometry. The alternative (attempting to measure a more accurate value for our universe) is fraught with difficulties and has no practical advantage over compatibility with existing software. Nick. _______________________________________________ gnumeric-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
